Word Finder - priestly

definition

Of or relating to priests; order of the priests; high religious position.

definition

Having the appearance of or resembling a priest.

Women are admitted to priestly offices as well as men.

The determination of a fixed date must therefore have been much earlier than Deuteronomy or the alleged period of the Priestly Code.

And it is instructive to observe that when the plebeians extorted their full share of political power they also demanded and obtained admission to every priestly college of political importance, to those, namely, of the pontiffs, the augurs, and the XV viri sacrorum.

There the foundations of the second great Persian Empire were laid, and Istakhr acquired special importance as the centre of priestly wisdom and orthodoxy.

Tobiah and his son Johanan were related by marriage to Judaean secular and priestly families, and active intrigues resulted, in which nobles and prophets took their part.

In many nations divination and priesthood have always gone hand in hand; at Rome, for example, the augurs and the XV viri sacrorum, who interpreted the Sibylline books, were priestly colleges.

The great oracles, however, were of Panhellenic celebrity and did not serve each a particular state, and so in this direction also the risk of an independent priestly power within the state was avoided.'

At this period the priestly caste gained its unbounded power over the minds of men " (Professor Rapson).

For further details as to the development of the priestly caste and wisdom in India the reader must refer to Brahminism; here it is enough to observe that among a religious people a priesthood which forms a close and still more an hereditary corporation, and the assistance of which is indispensable in all religious acts, must rise to practical supremacy in society except under the strongest form of despotism, where the sovereign is head of the Church as well as of the state.

Priestly acts - that is, acts done by one and accepted by the gods on behalf of many - are common to all antique religions, and cannot be lacking where the primary subject of religion is not the individual but the natural community.

But the origin of a separate priestly class, distinct from the natural heads of the community, cannot be explained by any such broad general principle; in some cases, as in Greece, it is little more than a matter of convenience that part of the religious duties of the state should be confided to special ministers charged with the care of particular temples, while in others the intervention of a special priesthood is indispensable to the validity of every religious act, so that the priest ultimately becomes a mediator and the vehicle of all divine grace.

But the highest developments of priestly influence are hardly separable from something of magical superstition, the opus operatum of the priest has the power of a sorcerer's spell.

The strength of the priesthood in Chaldaea and in Egypt stands plainly in the closest connexion with the survival of a magical element in the state religion, and Rome, in like manner, is more priestly than Greece, because it is more superstitious.

In most cases, however, where an ancient civilization shows us a strong priestly system we are unable to make out in any detail the steps by which that system was elaborated; the clearest case perhaps is the priesthood of the Jews, which is not less interesting from its origin and growth 1 Cf.

These acts required no priestly aid; each man slew his own victim and divided the sacrifice in his own circle; the share of the god was the blood which was smeared upon or poured out beside stone (nosb, ghabghab) set up as an altar or perhaps as a symbol of the deity.

Thus the firstlings, first-fruits and vows are still the free gift of the individual which no human authority exacts, and which every householder presents and consumes with his circle in a sacrificial feast without priestly aid.

The priestly position of the family survived the fall of Shiloh and the capture of the ark, and it was members of this house who consulted Jehovah for the early kings until Solomon deposed Abiathar.

It is plain that the various priestly colleges regarded themselves as one order, that they had common traditions of law and ritual which were traced back to Moses, and common interests which had not been vindicated without a struggle (Deut., ut supra).

Private sacrifices, too, could hardly be offered without some priestly aid now that ritual was more complex; the provision of Deut.

Further details respecting priestly offices and hereditary priesthoods and the relation of Aaronids to Zadokids will be found briefly discussed in Ency.

What the priestly Torah was at the time of the exile can be seen from the collection of laws in Lev.

The bases of priestly power under this system are the unity of the altar, its inaccessibility to laymen and to the inferior ministers of the sanctuary, and the specific atoning functions of the blood of priestly sacrifices.

So fundamental a change as lies between Hosea and the Priestly Code was only possible in the general dissolution of the old life of Israel produced by the Assyrians and by the prophets; and indeed the new order did not take shape as a system till the exile had made a great change in old institutions.

Nevertheless, the concentration of all ritual at a single point, and the practical exclusion of laymen from active participation in it - for the old sacrificial feast had now shrunk into entire insignificance in comparison with the stated priestly holocausts and atoning rites2 - lent powerful assistance to the growth of a new and higher type of personal religion, the religion which found its social expression not in material acts of oblation, but in the language of the Psalms. In the best times of the old kingdom the priests had shared the place of the prophets as the religious leaders of the nation; under the second Temple they represented the unprogressive traditional side of religion, and the leaders of thought were the psalmists and the scribes, who spoke much more directly to the piety of the nation.

The High Priest at such a moment seemed to embody all the glory of the nation, as the kings had done of old, and when the time came to strike a successful blow for freedom it was a priestly house that led the nation to the victory which united in one person the functions of High Priest and prince.

From the foundation of the Hasmonean state to the time of Herod the history of the high-priesthood merges in the political history of the nation; from Herod onward the priestly aristocracy of the Sadducees lost its chief hold over the nation and expired in vain controversy with the Pharisees.

Two points in this theory were laid hold of - the doctrine of priestly mediation and the system of priestly hierarchy.

The idea that presbyters and bishops are priests and the successors of the Old Testament priesthood first appears in full force in the writings of Cyprian, and here it is not the notion of priestly mediation but that of priestly power which is insisted on.

Other examples of priestly princes are given by Strabo in speaking of Pessinus (p. 567) and Olbe (p. 672).

It is sufficient to remark here that the presentation of the sacrifice of the mass came to be viewed as the essential priestly office, so that the Christian presbyter really was a sacerdos in the antique sense.

The idea of priestly asceticism expressed in the celibacy of the clergy belongs also to certain types of heathen and especially Semitic priesthood, to those above all in which the priestly service is held to have a magical or theurgic quality.

In spite of his political reforms, he opposed the admission of the plebeians to the consulship and priestly offices; and, although these reforms might appear to be democratic in character and calculated to give preponderance to the lowest class of the people, his probable aim was to strengthen the power of the magistrates (and lessen that of the senate) by founding it on the popular will, which would find its expression in the urban inhabitants and could be most easily influenced by the magistrate.

As distinguished from the Priestly Narrative (to be mentioned presently), it has a distinctly prophetical character; it treats the history from the standpoint of the prophets, and the religious ideas characteristic of the prophets often find expression in it.

The Priestly sections of the Hexateuch (known as " P ") remain still to be considered.

In " P's " picture of the Mosaic age there are many ideal elements; it represents the priestly ideal of the past rather than the past as it actually was.

On the other hand, if 1 were disproved, 4 would immediately fall through, and the strength of 5 would be weakened (as it would also by the disproof of 2), because the argument for the date of many Psalms is derived from religious ideas and the significance of these varies greatly according as the Priestly Code is held to be early or late.

This is not the place to notice the course of Jewish literary activity in Palestine or Alexandria, whether along the more rigid lines of Pharisaic legalism (the development of the canonical " priestly " law), or the popular and less scholastic phases, which recall the earlier apocalyptical tendencies of the Old Testament and were cultivated alike by early Jewish and Christian writers.

The rise of this function of the prophets is plainly parallel with the change which took place under the kings in the position of the priestly oracle; the Torah of the priests now dealt rather with permanent sacred ordinances than with the giving of new divine counsel for special occasions.

Yahweh's ever-present kingship in Israel, which was the chief religious idea brought into prominence by the national revival, demanded a more continuous manifestation of His revealing spirit than was given either by the priestly lot or by the rise of occasional seers; and where could this be sought except among the prophets?

The revelation thus looked for may be found in natural omens, in the priestly lot or some similar sacral oracle, or, finally, in the words of a seer who is held to be in closer contact with the deity than common men.

It is in the exercise of his priestly functions that the resemblance is most clearly shown.

He thus views the consecration of the elements as akin to other consecrations; and, like priestly ordination, as involving " a metamorphosis for the better," a phrase which later on became classical.

But the dominant priestly caste of the Magians, on whose support the king was dependent, were naturally hostile to him, and after some successes Mani was made a prisoner, and had then to flee.

When his father died in 78, he was by his mother forthwith appointed high priest, and on her death in 69 he claimed the succession to the supreme civil authority also; but, after a brief and troubled reign of three months, he was compelled to abdicate both kingly and priestly dignities in favour of his more energetic and ambitious younger brother Aristobulus II.

In 41 B.C. he was practically superseded by Antony's appointment of Herod and Phasael to be tetrarchs of Judaea; and in the following year he was taken prisoner by the Parthians, deprived of his ears that he might be permanently disqualified for priestly office, and carried to Babylon.

A priestly kin owned perhaps the spot haunted by the god, and so became holy.

The presiding priest seems always to have been the chief to whom the temple belonged, for there is no evidence for the existence of a special priestly class in the North.

The priestly families, we learn, hearing that the God preached by Gregory needed not sacrifice, sent to the king a deputation and asked how they were to live, if they became Christians; for until then the priests and their families had lived off the portions of the animal victims and other offerings reserved to them by pagan custom.

The priestly families then went over en masse.

None but a scion of a priestly family could become a deacon, elder or bishop. Accordingly the primacy remained in the family of Gregory until about 374, when the king Pap or Bab murdered Nerses, who had been ordained by Eusebius of Caesarea (362-370) and was over-zealous in implanting in Armenia the canons about celibacy, marriage, fasting, hospices and monastic life which Basil had established in Cappadocia.